Fatal beauty.

Wolf Blitzer, Dumbass. One group that could stand to hire more veterans is the news business. You would think that military experience would be an important qualification for a journalist assigned to cover a war. Lacking that, how is it that CNN has the budget to hire asshats like James Carville and Robert Novak, but apparently can’t afford anyone to teach CTT to reporters who have successfully mastered the journalism programs of America’s top colleges?

[Update: Scroll down and read the updates. Mr. Kirk and the CSM have corrected the story to reflect that the HRC did not actually take such a position. Kirk appear to have quoted the complaint, believing it was the HRC’s own position. Thanks to readers Antti and Aaron for asking the specific questions that caused me to contact Don Kirk and ask him for verification. ] When my wife first showed me the the comments of Prof. Kang Jeong-Ju, South...

Post-Mortem on the Six-Party Talks: My synopsis is here, at NKZone.

The BBC reported the inevitable conclusion on Saturday, Washington time: Talks on North Korea’s nuclear plans are due to go into recess on Sunday for two weeks, China’s Xinhua news agency quotes a Russian official as saying. Chief negotiator Alexander Alexeyev said the talks would break up after a plenary session on Sunday morning. The North continues to deny US reports of a uranium-based capability. Three previous rounds of talks have ended in failure, but this fourth round has gone...

The South Koreans are asking to take jurisdiction over a soldier involved in a recent fatal traffic accident that killed a 51 year-old Korean woman pushing a yogurt cart along a street. All available evidence suggests that the death, tragic as it may have been, was accidental. The soldier was driving an Army truck, and presumably was on duty at the time. Under the U.S.-Korea Status of Forces Agreement, Article XXII, para. 3(a)(iii), the U.S. military has primary jurisdiction over...

The Silencing of Hong Kong has begun in earnest.

Whenever you read that the World Food Program is calling a situation a “food crisis” or “food shortage,” bear in mind that this is how they described the North Korean famine while millions were starving, out of a fear of offending the “host” nation. The reasons for this food shortage, incipient famine, whatever, are also analogous: Mr Morris said the government’s policy of trying to control the economy and the movement of people was to blame for the fact that...

Talks Update: The BBC says “near deadlock.” I don’t know how one concludes that they’re not already deadlocked; “near breakdown” might be more accurate.

It’s bad news if you hold hope in negotiating an easy deal with North Korea, better news if you see North Korea’s self-isolation as a better outcome for the present: BEIJING, Aug. 4 – Negotiators on the North Korean nuclear program decided today to meet for at least one more day in hopes of breaking a deadlock with North Korea, even as discussions began about what might be salvaged if this round of talks ends without an agreement. The outcome...

When so many others’ idea of public diplomacy appears to involve beer vessels, it’s encouraging to see some decent public diplomacy from the commanding general.

George Galloway is not content simply being corrupt, slick, and mendacious. It is his destiny to be a corrupt, slick, mendacious traitor and an abettor of murderers. From a safe distance, of course.

His latest piece in The American Enterprise appears to a be a refined version of this speech, delivered in Seoul in May, and an extended version of a piece he published in the Weekly Standard in June. Read it if you haven’t already.

Koreans and Japanese Are Brothers! Let there be Sunshine over Tokdo! An interesting study here, although I have my doubts about who represents “Japanese,” “Chinese,” or “European” genes. Japanese from the West have a distinctly more “Korean” look than those in the Kanto Plain and further North, who tend to look more European. There are also drastic variations between the peoples of North, South, and West China. The one that would have interested me the most would have been a...

Three Hundred Bucks for a Bus Tour of Kaesong? Someone should tell the Donga-A Ilbo that “capitalism” and “profit-crushing greed” are not synonyms.

On one hand, it’s not a walkout. On the other, five out of six nations (N. Korea being the sixth) agree on a draft of basic, non-specific, wishy-washy principles. China is turning the screws . . . or wants us to think it is. Update: Amb. Chris Hill says, “We cannot have a situation where the DPRK (North Korea) pretends to abandon their nuclear programme and we pretend to believe them.” That’s encouraging.

OK, this officially concerns me, presuming the facts are as reported. Lack of clarity as to how we treat terrorist detainees doesn’t excuse this. This guy was a captured uniformed officer. As such, he was presumably entitled to POW status. The Army trains every soldier how to treat POWs. I’ve personally trained thousands of them. And of course, even a captured terrorist would be entitled to better treatment than this under Common Article II of Geneva. Given the content of...